Coping with conflict in the executive family;

Page 1

An Interview with Barrie S. Greiff, M.D.
At the Firm's management seminars at­tended
by new partners and directors over
the past three years. Dr. Barrie S. Greiff has
led a discussion on ways to deal with the
conflicting pulls of work and home. A prac­ticing
psychiatrist, Dr. Greiff teaches a
unique course, which he originated, on
"The Executive Family" at the Harvard
Business School. The course is intended for
couples, so both husband and wife attend
the sessions. At least one of the spouses
must be enrolled in the Harvard MBA
program.
H&S Reports conducted this interview
with Dr. Greiff in order to bring to its
readers some of the concerns that have
been brought out in his course at Harvard
and in the Firm seminars.
Did your course on "The Executive
Family" start in the MBA program
at Harvard?
Yes, because I wanted both husbands and
wives in the course initially. The average
age of the Harvard MBA student is
twenty-seven, so this was a wonderful op­portunity
to bring together a group of
people who.had previous business experi­ence.
I wanted as heterogeneous a group
as possible, i.e., those with previous busi­ness
experience, those newly married,
ten-year-married couples, those with chil­dren
and without, and so forth. We in­cluded
a number of topics, such as the ef­fects
of travel and relocation, promotion
and success, job loss, stress within and
outside the organization, as well as
methods of coping with these stressful
situations. I felt that if we were to look at
these phenomena it would give the couple
an advantage prior to their entrance into
the business world, or their return to it, so
they might better cope with these normal
human dilemmas.
Did you discuss the two-career
family, in which both husband
and wife have a career to con­sider?
Yes. We are seeing more and more families
where the wife as well as the husband has
a career. By that I mean not just a job, but a
career. I predict this will be the biggest
single factor affecting American family life
in the next twenty-five years. The career
wife will face traveling, relocation and so
forth just as her husband does. And at
times there will be considerable conflict as
to whose career comes first.
For instance, some couples who have
dual careers think they can live apart in
separate cities, commute on weekends
and have a viable relationship. That may
be attractive in a theoretical sense —
the difficulty comes in practicing this style
of living.
Did a lot of students in your
course try to express their con­cerns
before they took the course,
but not really focus on them?
Does the course help them bring
out into the open what had
bothered them before?
Yes, it did. I asked them at the start to give
their reasons for taking the course, and we
tried to address the issues they raised. For
example:
To become more familiar with the
lifestyle of a business-oriented family
To understand how the husband-wife
concerns may conflict
To understand the effect of changing
employers or losing a job
To learn how to apportion time be­tween
business and family
To help me handle a husband with a
high-pressure job